A eulogy for Mr. Butch by Jack Harshman

Jack Harshman, a decades-long friend of Mr. Butch’s, delivered the following eulogy at Mr. Butch’s memorial service, Sunday, July 22.

Jack Harshman, a decades-long friend of Mr. Butch’s, delivered the following eulogy at Mr. Butch’s memorial service, Sunday, July 22.

I first glimpsed Mr. Butch around 1978, standing across the street from Berklee School of Music, blasting a powerful mutant punk/funk hybrid from a battered Hondo guitar through a spunky little Mouse amp — his standard equipment for years, as it turned out. He cut an imposing figure, to be sure — a 6-foot-5 black man whose dark face was covered with colorful stick-on dots and framed by a wild cascading curtain of medium-length dreadlocks.

It was a fitting introduction, because we eventually formed a band together about three years later, the Holy Men, part of a friendship that lasted almost 30 years.

Despite his formidable presence, I found Mr. Butch to be easily approachable, and we started hanging out together around Kenmore Square. I still have his business card from the era, plain but pointed — Mr. Butch, Mayor, Kenmore Square. And it was true in a spiritual sense, if not politically, because Mr. Butch was an iconic figure in the area, a sage minstrel, raconteur and pied piper for the street kids and the punk rockers, a friendly and ubiquitous presence whose unflaggingly positive vibes were magnetic for many.

With beer and weed as his twin engines, he was always there; arriving early, he played his guitar, partied and held court. He put it simply — “Six, seven, eight or nine/Kenmore Square, rain or shine/Reason that I go down there/Lots of girls; lots of beer.”

Butch supported himself mainly through panhandling, but he did it like he did everything else, with dignity and style, and shared whatever he got.

He had a certain way with certain of the ladies, usually courteous and chivalric, yet unrepentantly chauvinistic; though he was acutely aware of racism, he was color-blind.

Mr. Butch was incredibly articulate, speaking in spontaneous rhymes and diatribes with anyone who wanted to interact, or at anyone who gave him the cold shoulder or the finger. But he always did it, as in his classic rejoinder, “in a kind way.” He looked out for the kids, and stood up for his friends; he was a gentle soul and a true peacemaker.

The only time I ever saw him get physical was when he came to the defense of two friends being repeatedly hassled by two bad-news street punks; Mr. Butch warned them twice, and when they didn’t stop, he unleashed one punch and two Bruce Lee-quality kicks that left two would-be tough guys sound asleep on the pavement.

He was kind and soft in his heart, but tough as nails, as many a cop who failed to dent his dreadlock helmet with a nightstick could attest.

The BU police had it in for Mr. Butch from way back, targeting him as Public Enemy No. 1 for the soulless gentrification of Kenmore, and they administered many rounds of rough injustice.

One time in 1981 the Holy Men made a pit-stop to buy some wine in the Square, and on the way to cross over to the bus stop (with an unopened bottle) two BU policemen told us to put our hands on the wall. Butch knew there was no getting away, but he didn’t want his friends to get busted, so he gave us a look, and went running, knowing the cops would chase him. They did, and Bunh Paul and I ran the other way, as two cruisers screamed past us to join the foot pursuit of Mr. Butch down Commonwealth Ave. We made it back home safely, but the police caught Mr. Butch and gave him a vicious beating, which he shrugged off in short order.

Mr. Butch was an amazingly fast healer, with a street-hardened immune system that could fight off the most aggressive organisms. He was also quite willing to suffer for his art; I met him once in Allston shortly after he participated in a student film — a favorite pastime for the incredibly telegenic Mr. Butch — in which he allowed a car to roll up over his hand. He had suffered a grotesque tire burn and skin avulsion that looked nastily infected, but two weeks later without treatment, there was no hint that it had ever happened. He would go the distance for effect, and once implored me to climax our comedy Gestapo interrogation skit at a party with a real cigarette burn instead of faking it like usual — I did, and we got thrown out of the party, but Butch’s cheek was smooth as baby skin a week later.

Mr. Butch was a fantastic musician; as a rhythm guitarist he had few peers, and no one played quite like him. Firmly grounded in the percussion that was his first musical passion — he once stated that all music was essentially percussion — his style was churning, propulsive and polyrhythmic; many of his songs were one-to-three chord simple, but others were fiendishly complex. A beat and a jazzman in an earlier incarnation, with his G string dangling and detuned down to D, Butch saw the Ramones, and he was never the same again after his punk rock epiphany, but he also integrated blues, funk, reggae and jazz into his rich and unique brew. He eschewed lead guitar for the most part, tossing off the occasional bumblebee trill or harmelodic yawp, but rhythm was his mistress. As a songwriter and lyricist, he was endlessly creative, often improvising several new songs in a single day, singing in a melodic baritone that could growl or jump to falsetto. His songs were street-folk stories, Mr. Butch’s personal experiences and vignettes inspired by the people he met, with lyrics ribald and witty, playful and poignant.

“Railroad Track” told the saga of finding a dead man on the hobo rails with a bottle of wine and a sackful of money beside him; “Hambone Man” was Mr. Butch, vagabond of wine, women, song and pig parts; “Nosepicker” spoke for itself.

The red model Hondo and the Mouse amp were his equipment staples, and he played them with great stamina, until they broke to pieces or blew apart. Mr. Butch demanded certain standards of his primitive equipment, and when he purchased a new guitar or was gifted with one, he had an unwavering ritual that preceded actually playing it — he wailed it on the ground with a fervor that would do Pete Townshend proud, declaring, “It’s gotta be a street guitar, Goddamnit!”

Butch and I started jamming together, and quickly developed a musical affinity, though it was a challenge in many ways. Butch played left-handed, but always used a right-hand model, so I would have to figure out the chord patterns upside-down. He would generate a flurry of new songs, and it was my job to memorize as many as I could and play them back, because Butch would often forget them as soon as they were played; we would then decide together which ones to keep in the repertoire. Mr. Butch would also grow bored with a song and change to another part-way in, and the patterns of verse and chorus could be quite variable.

Another barrier was practice space, more because of the interpersonal dynamics than the noise factor.

Being Mr. Butch’s friend meant having to deal with the negative reactions of those who judged him by different standards, and there were always some whose responses were extreme. One of my roommates at the time had a violent antipathy to Butch, based mostly on odor; as a lifelong allergy sufferer, I had no problem with it, but there was no getting around it — Mr. Butch was rank, to be charitable. Mr. Butch claimed that he was once taking a bath, when an unidentified assailant burst through the bathroom door and beat him with a baseball bat; from then on, never again.

I was forced to sneak him in the window of my room when he came by, and an ugly confrontation was inevitable; we were in the living room one day when we heard my roommate come charging up the stairs, screaming in his stuttering way, “I ca-aaaan sme-eeel him!” Joe burst in, and dumped out a rack of aluminum softball bats on the floor, challenging Mr. Butch, “Whi-iich oo-oone do you wa-aant first, Butch?” (there’s that bat thing again). I moved out shortly after, and moved Butch in with me into a house in Brighton, where we spent a memorable heatless winter, during which we formed the Holy Men, along with another wildly talented street musician from Allston introduced by Butch, guitarist and drummer Bunh Paul, a Montagnard tribesman from Vietnam who had fought as a Special Forces paratrooper and tunnel rat with the 101st Airborne.

Mr. Butch declared me to be the leader of the band, although he wrote all the songs, refusing to learn anyone else’s; Butch felt that he had enough responsibility as “leader of the gang,” the American Flag gang to which we all belonged, more of a spiritual collective of like-minded hedonists than a gang in any standard sense of the word.

As the Holy Men, we rehearsed as often as I could get Butch and Paul reasonably sober in the same place at once, and we hashed out a repertoire of about two dozen songs, with Mr. Butch and I as twin guitarists, and Paul on the drums; Butch always demanded I play more lead, though I always thought our dual polyrhythmic guitars created the most interesting element.

We played a spate of gigs in clubs and loft parties, opening for Flipper at the Channel for our first show; we had a small but loyal following, and it was always a rush to see people who knew Mr. Butch from the street gaping in disbelief that he was actually up on stage as a more-or-less professional musician. As much as Butch could be a royal pain in rehearsal, changing songs in midstream, drinking way too much and arguing irascibly, he was a true professional on stage, tight and dependable as he slashed his guitar and wrapped his ample lips around the microphone as if sucking the head off a crawfish, living his art.

On stage, we cut a striking figure, Mr. Butch and I towering around 6-5, Paul about a foot shorter; Butch and I formed a back-to-back pyramid, and Paul came dashing out between us to open the show, before leaping behind the skins to start us off with a burst of his manic energy.

We never made any money, with our meager payouts being funneled into promotion by our manager, the intrepid Billy Ruane, but there was no resentment — Billy did exactly what he promised, opening the doors. Mr. Butch requested a contract that specified he be paid in Bloody Marys, but we only made enough for that to happen once. The Holy Men never reached our potential, burning out from too many beers and creative arguments, but we had unforgettable fun, an experience that enriched my life immeasurably.

Mr. Butch and I stayed friends through all the years to come, though I saw him less frequently as time went by. My lifestyle changed, but Mr. Butch’s never did. It was obvious that he chose it to be that way — Butch chose to channel his startling intelligence and creativity in nontraditional ways, and he opted out of the 9-5, fixed address world, walking off the grid a long time ago and never looking back.

Mr. Butch was technically homeless for almost all of 30-some years, but he never lacked for places to stay, with a legion of friends who were glad to help, who enjoyed his company; he never stayed in shelters, posing the rhetorical question, “Do you know what it’s like when 200 winos all take their shoes off at the same time?!”

He articulated his philosophy with the cameras rolling on the local news and human interest program “Chronicle” — “I looked at what other people have, and they make it so hard to get what they’ve got, their goals and glories, that I decided I didn’t want any of it — I’d be happy with nothing.” And so he was, more of the time than anyone I knew.

He was saddened at times by the rejection and discrimination he faced on a daily basis from the establishment, the monied and the prejudiced, but nothing and no one ever kept him down. Mr. Butch was not part of the workaday world, but he was anything but lazy. Besides his unflagging devotion to his art, he sought and performed paid work whenever and wherever he could get it; Butch often wore a homemade sandwich board advertising his desire to do so.

Panhandling, odd jobs and errands were staples, but Mr. Butch would take the jobs others avoided, whether it was working in the acid factory in Allston (“Is this a corrosive?”), getting thrown into icy waters by lobster fishermen to untangle the traps, hauled into the boat and rubbed down from blue back to black and tossed in again, or selling football cards as a fungible asset for the mob.

The universal right to work was one of the three main planks of his gubernatorial platform as a write-in candidate back in the ’80s, along with the legalization of marijuana and elimination of the Denver Boot. Yet only the most basic material possessions meant anything to Mr. Butch, just his equipment and his sleeping bag — “Mr. Butch’s house” — and those could always be replaced.

A bohemian and hippie at heart, Butch was uncommonly generous, and always shared whatever he had — his beer, his weed, his money and most of all his unquenchable joie de vivre. He was a man you could trust with your last dollar, even if he had nothing; he once found a wallet that had just been dropped, and chased the man’s car for three blocks, pocketing the money and mailing the wallet back only after the driver looked out to see Butch running and yelled, “F you, nigger!” As detailed on the “Chronicle” program, he once found a large pile of 20s, and spent the day handing them out one at a time to friends and strangers.

Over the years, I saw Mr. Butch less, but I was always proud to be his friend. I always introduced him to everyone I knew; I understood that not everyone was as tolerant as I was toward some of his peccadilloes, such as his aversion to bathing, but response to Butch proved a pretty good litmus test as a judge of character, and on the rare occasions that Mr. Butch didn’t like someone, they were to be avoided.

Butch was accepting, welcoming and gregarious, radiating a positive aura that touched everyone who ventured close enough. He was a survivor but also a thriver, a muse and a minstrel, an urban shaman with a tall beer and a joint. He was asked on “Chronicle” what it would be like for him if he were still on the street in his 50s, and he answered without hesitation, “It makes no difference to me at all/It will not lead to a man’s downfall.” And it never did.